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~ Descartes Peoplevox ~

you to offer things like picking orders until midnight so effective, and therefore, we as the operations and
to get the customers their orders the next day, getting warehouse team needed to be equally as effective.”
out same-day delivery to 55% of Australia, way ahead of
anybody else, including Amazon. We weren’t just worried “I was part of a huge logistics project and marketing
about packing peoples’ orders and getting it to them; it exercise called ‘Shop The Runway.’ We hosted a fashion
was about using the exceptional fulfilment capabilities show online where, in real-time, people could order the
to bring people back and offer an incredible experience. pieces that the models were wearing down the runway,
Great tracking, prompt delivery and easy returns are all and we would then deliver it to them within three hours.
ways of exceeding expectations. Some companies are We had to be really smart with our inventory, but it was
happy just with making a sale, and that part of the user executed successfully. We went live with that marketing
experience, but the post-sale journey is as important. If campaign, live and broadcast on the internet, and we had
you want to retain customers, and for me, lifetime value orders coming in within minutes, and we were sending
is the most important metric above all, you have to have a those orders out to the customers within the three-hour
very slick logistics offering. You have to get the parcel to window!”
them quickly and cheaply,
easily, all with accuracy, “BRANDS AREN’T A new benchmark for
and if they send it back,
delivering growth
just handle it quickly and
An impressive use-case of
but it is absolutely one IN THE BUSINESS logistics as a selling point,
of course. Logistics is
underrated in e-commerce,
and when it launched in
for brands and retailers.
of the pillars of building 2014, it set a new standard
a sustainable business OF ‘KEEPING A Brands aren’t in the business
because it has such an of ‘keeping a low profile.’
LOW PROFILE.’”
impact on the lifetime Instead, they want to create
value of a customer.” as much noise as possible,
shining the spotlight on
Use of logistics capa- themselves for these limited
bility as a marketing launches, peak periods and
campaign seasonal spikes. It’s when their marketing spends is at its
So that covers upscaling and streamlining operations to highest, and more importantly, when their ability to fulfil
meet growing demand, as well as extracting second-order orders is given the most rigorous testing. It is the absolute
benefits such as increased customer retention rates through minimum, in 2020, to offer cheap, flexible and accurate
exceptional fulfilment. But what about actively marketing fulfilment, time and again to your customers, less you face
your business with a logistics-capability based promise? a wave of social media comments, dislikes, 1-star-reviews
Enter Jay Carpenter, who we best know as the mastermind and a crash in the lifetime value you extract from your
behind the launch of Good Pair Day’s distribution community. And what we’ve seen here is that the potential
operation, but who also worked for The Iconic. This for going above and beyond the minimum, and actually
Rocket Internet-backed fashion retailer took the market using logistics capabilities as ‘marketing tools’ in and of
by storm in the mid-2010s with their bold site, creative themselves, is a path more trodden than ever before. ••
marketing campaigns and impressive range of featured
brands.

“The Iconic was a business in hypergrowth mode. They
had a large marketing budget, but at that point, the
operation hadn’t kept up. Having just moved from a 3PL
and setting up their own warehouse, they still didn’t
have racking installed, and there were a lot of processes
going on that you wouldn’t expect for a business of that
size. They were ready to completely change the way
Australian consumers shop for fashion, and the mission DO YOU WANT TO BENEFIT FROM THE KNOWLEDGE OF ‘THE INSIDE TRACK FOR
never changed, always pushing the envelope. This often AMBITIOUS BRANDS’ OF OTHER CEOS, OPERATIONAL LEADS AND E-COMMERCE
required operational shifts: there were occasions in which EXPERTS?
great marketing efforts were executed with the expectation VISIT WWW.PEOPLEVOX.COM AND GET INSPIRED BY THE PEOPLEVOX 10X CLUB
of a 5-10% increase in sales, and yet we would see a 70% HALL OF FAME!
increase in orders overnight! The marketing team were

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